FRANCE
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE, second instalment (2017)
Darwin’s Nightmare, the monumental puzzle-painting that was first shown to the public during the 2016 edition of the Grand BAZ’ART, continues its sprawling development through another very large “fresco” in which the obsessive search for something pure and true in the middle of the
soulless day-to-day grind carries on, as unstoppable as the proliferation of blind silhoutettes and broken things in the two majestic works.
DARWIN'S NIGHTMARE, first instalment (2016)
Jean Rustin, Bosch, Dix, Dürer – all these references flash through the head of the onlooker in front of the last large size creation signed by Hubert Duprilot and entitled Darwin’s Nightmare. Yet one can’t shake the feeling that all these borrowed faces are nothing but bait, nothing but the gloves that this hyper-sensitive artist needs to put on in order to handle his own visions.
His aesthetic language, personal and coherent, is made-up of lines that are both precise and evanescent, of rushed strokes of charcoal, of smudged inks and muddy acrylics, of disintegrated contours – proliferations of soulless flesh –, of visceral reds, putrid browns and dirty blues: all the chromatic range of a troubled psyche, not the artist’s, but the epoch’s. The fluid dissolution of the monstrous creatures is held in balance by the architectural rigour of the backdrops, by the black-and-white of the chessboard, by the undulating pipes that give structure to the space. A skilfully controlled chaos, a baroque orgy composed of a multitude of carefully dosed small effects.